On World Environment Day 2025, as India confronts a growing environmental disease burden, there is a need for integrated approaches that go beyond conventional frameworks to assess and mitigate health risks.

About Environment Disease Burden

• Environmental Disease Burden (EDB) is the total impact of diseases caused by harmful environmental factors like air and water pollution, poor sanitation, and toxic exposures. 
  • It is measured using Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) to reflect both illness and early death.
    • DALY = Years of Life Lost (YLL) + Years Lived with Disability (YLD).

About Exposomics

• Exposomics is the study of the totality of environmental exposures (chemical, physical, social,  psycho-social environments and biological) an individual faces throughout life and how these exposures interact with diet and lifestyle and internal individual characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics to create health or disease
• Comparable in impact to the Human Genome Project, it complements genomics by focusing on environmental contributions to disease.
• This would allow the generation of an atlas of exposure wide associations (EWAS) to complement genome-wide associations (GWAS) and enable discovery-based analysis of environmental influences on health.
• Environmental disease burden (EDB) tells how much disease is caused by the environment, while Exposomics explains how different environmental exposures interact with biology to affect health.

Reasons For Need Of Exposomics

• India’s Burden: India accounts for around 25% of the global environmental disease burden.
  • Nearly three million deaths and 100 million deaths are attributable to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks.
  • OEH risk factors in India are also estimated to account for more than 50% of the attributable burden for non-communicable diseases such as ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive lung disease, lung cancer etc.
  • India accounts for up to 154 million or 20% of the total estimated IQ points lost globally in children under five.
• Limitations of GBD: The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) framework considers only about 11 risk categories.
  • Many exposures like microplastics, complex chemical mixtures, environmental noise, and solid waste are excluded.
• Health Inequities: Vulnerable populations are disproportionately affected due to lack of access to clean environments, health systems, and nutrition.
  • Depression, anxiety and other mental health outcomes, driven by both ecological concerns and direct health impacts of climate-sensitive environmental risk factors such as fine particulate matter, are also important to consider.

Implications For India

• Public Health Integration: Incorporating exposomics can help prioritize environmental risk factors in national health programs, improving disease prevention strategies.
• Stronger Regulation: Data-driven insights from exposomics can inform stronger regulations on pollution, chemicals, and occupational exposures.
• Disease Surveillance: It enables early detection of exposure-related diseases, enhancing surveillance systems for conditions like cancer, respiratory disorders, and metabolic diseases.
• Precision Healthcare: Exposomics supports precision medicine by linking individual exposures to health outcomes, leading to targeted interventions.

Challenges In Development of  Exposomics

• Limited Capacities and Resources: The ability to generate exposomics data is not widely available in India, due to gaps in analytical, environmental, and public health infrastructure.
• Implementation Hurdles: Environmental health management programmes face numerous operational and institutional challenges.
• Fragmented Data Ecosystem: A lack of harmonised, sustained, and interoperable data repositories prevents the integration and sharing of critical exposure and health data.
• Perception Barriers: The complexity of synchronising interdisciplinary technologies may discourage stakeholders from engaging with exposome science.

Way Forward

• Creation Of Data Ecosystem: There is a need to create a data ecosystem in which harmonised data can be found, accessed, and shared through sustained and interoperable data repositories.
• Strengthen Capacity and Infrastructure: Invest in capacity building and align analytical, environmental, and public health systems to enable integrated, data-driven exposomics research and application.

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